Song Capacity Calculator for MP3 Players

If you’re considering buying an MP3 player, or are just wondering how much of your music collection will fit on to one, then this little utility could be just what you’re looking for.

The memory, or storage capacity, of an MP3 player is usually measured in GB (Giga Bytes), or MB (Mega Bytes) for the smaller/older players. However, the number of songs that your MP3 player can potentially store is not only determined by its memory capacity, but also by the bit rate of your MP3 tracks.

If you’re not sure of what a bit rate is, or what it has to do with things, then the previous article on What are bit rates? may help explain things for you.

If you’ve already got a collection of music in MP3 format (or one of the other popular music compression formats such as WMA or AAC), then your bit rates have already been set. However, when you’re converting your music from CD to MP3 (ripping as it’s called), you should be able to choose the bit rate most suitable to your requirements from within your chosen conversion software. 128 kbps is usually a good starting point as a compromise between sound quality and storage requirements.

MP3 Song Capacity Calculator

MP3 Song Capacity Calculator

Player Memory Capacity:

Bit Rate of Songs:

Hours of Music:

Typical No. Albums:

45 mins/album

Typical No. Songs:

3:30 mins/song

Assumptions

The MP3 Song Capacity Calculator makes a few assumptions for its calculations. As such the quoted results are only approximations and may vary from actual results. The key assumptions are:

Average album length is 45 minutes

Average song length is 3 minutes 30 seconds

All MP3 track data is 100%audio

All of the MP3 player’s memory can be utilised

If you’d like to use this calculator on your own website, please feel free to do so. All I ask is that you put a link next to the calculator crediting me and linking back to this web page.

The JavaScript for this and the following storage capacity calculator is:

1:// Define average album/song length and artwork size

2:var SECONDS_PER_ALBUM = 2700; // in seconds = 45 mins

3:var SECONDS_PER_SONG = 210; // in seconds = 3:30 mins

4:var ALBUM_COVER_STORAGE = 51200; // in bytes = 50kB in bytes

5:

6:

7:// MP3 song space calculation

8:function CalcSongs()

9: {

10:// Get key variables from HTML form

11: intMemory = document.getElementById("memory").value;

12: intBitrate = document.getElementById("bitrate").value;

13:

14:// Calculate total time available in seconds for given memory and bitrate

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Comments

Handy page – or so I thought until I noticed the bug…
Looks like for a given bitrate choice, the same values for Hours of Music: etc are calculated for both 4GB and 8GB capacity. Just a copy/paste typo I think:
4 GB 8 GB
in line 133 of your html source.
The 16GB entry is OK – haven’t checked the rest!
Nearly put me off the 8GB player I was looking at til I realised that the 16GB looked like 4 times the size!!!

James: Thanks for pointing out the school boy error. Hopefully I’ve fixed it now and it’s back to being a “handy page” again. If you’d like to try it again, let me know if you find any other deliberate mistakes. 🙂

Glad you liked the tool. With fixed bit rates it’s fairly straightforward to predict resulting file sizes, unfortunately with variable bit rates like V0 (highest quality variable bit rate on the LAME MP3 encoder) the bit rate varies depending on the source material making impossible to predict the final outcome. Similarly with FLAC, compression ratios can vary anywhere from 30 to 50% dependent on the track. It’s like trying to hit a moving target!

I’m afraid that I’m one of those rare creatures who doesn’t have an iPod, or use iTunes, so I don’t know how much help I can be. However, if your songs are encoded at a higher bit rate, then encoding them at a lower bit rate will definitely allow you to store more songs on your iPod. It’s probably best to reload/encode songs again from scratch. If you re-encode a 256kbps song to 128kbps song the audio quality will be worse than encoding the original track straight to 128kbps. If you can manage to find out what your existing tracks are encoded at, that would be a good start. I certainly wouldn’t go below 128kbps for your music though.

I hope this goes some way to answering your question. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but I don’t really have a working knowledge of the Apple stuff.

Anny is given a new MP3 player for her birthday which contains 4GB of storage. Anny has a collection of 400 CDs.
(a) Calculate how many CDs can she fit onto her MP3 player.
You may assume that each CD lasts for 60 minutes, and is recorded with standard parameters for CD-quality stereo sound. You may also assume that each minute of sound stored in MP3 format takes 1MB.

Thanks for the conversion information, Richard. I’ve been “googleing” for about an hour trying to figure if I should buy a 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB MP3 player for some of my classical music that I listen to in my car, and your site was the first that answered my question. Many, many thanks.

Hi Richard
Hope to help me about a problem.
The capacity of a song in mp3 is 4minutes and 30 seconds. Download spees is 56kpbs. How much time is needed to download this song and what is the capacity of her

Could you help me about Computer Networking.
I have to do a project on this subject which has to do Developing the chat with multicast, this project should realize the program c #. While my colleagues in other group have to Develop client program that communicate with the server in C #. NET UDP. In the end I need to link the chat with my colleague’s server.
best regards

Since everyone is so happy with this calculator, I must be missing something. I’ve tried the MP3 Song Calculator on this page in both chrome and firefox and the resultant greyed out firgures never change whether I use the smallest or the greatest bit rate or change the storage. It is always 2.19, 3.1, 39.

What have I missed? I was looking for a ‘submit’ or ‘calculate’ button but could not see one on the form so I assumed it would automatically recalculate on a change to the bit rate or storage capacity. But no change?????

Hi Brendan, You hadn’t missed anything. Unfortunately a WordPress update seemed to have knocked out the Javascript. I think I’ve fixed it now if you’d like to give it another go. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Richard

That’s working fine now Richard thanks. I was considering buying a sony voice recorder to record a three day convention. Because it had only internal memory of 2GB, I was keen to see if I could record the whole event without having to ’empty’ it to a computer. It is set to record at 192 kbps so using your calculator I see it will definitely cover 24 hours at that rate. – thanks –

Nice site – thanks for doing this. I’m moving from a 500MB unit to a 8GB Sansa ordered from B&H. I will have to see if the sound sacrifice (128kbps vs 250kbps) is worth being able to store 1/2 (or double, depending on how you look at it) the number of CDs.

Hello Richard
I have just bought a 16GB Sony Walkman and put three of my CD’s into it to get familier with it. When I put another one in next day my first three had disapeared. What have I done wrong. Also the Walkman had music in when I bought it. This is still there. I have about 200 CD’s so I cannot down load them all at once.
Thank you
Gordon Coulling

How did you transfer your music from your computer to your Walkman, using something like Windows Media Player or iTunes, or dragging and copying the files directly yourself from a folder on your PC to a music folder on your Walkman?

Your 200 CDs should fit on a 16GB Walkman, although they will take a while to rip to MP3, or whatever format you’re using.

On a slightly different tack, I am just starting to rip all my CDs on my laptop to Flac initially. Does the quality of my cd drive and/or sound card affect the quality of the rip, or as it is all digital does it not matter?

Regarding your question, the sound card shouldn’t make a difference as the ripping should all be happening in the digital domain. However, the CD drive could potentially. Have a read of this article on CD players and issues such as jitter: http://www.stereophile.com/reference/590jitter/

Most songs are averaged 4 minutes not 3 and half. Now a days they are even bigger than 4 minutes. So this is inaccurate. I listen to metal, metalcore, deathcore, death metal, and some songs are a half hour long. So really best way to average it out is in between that time. So I say around more of 6 minutes average, since only one or two songs are 30 minutes long.

Hi Michael, An interesting point particularly with your genre of music that has some very long tracks which would skew the average. Songs might also be getting longer than they used to be. It all comes down to an individual’s music collection and perhaps the genre of music they listen to and the era in which it was produced. Sample size is quite important too, how many songs to take the average of; more is obviously better. So, for the moment as an approximation across the board I’m happy to stick with 3 minutes 30 seconds.